February 3, 2025
As a product leader, prioritization is one of the most valuable skills you can develop. Every day, you’re faced with a flood of feature requests, bug reports, stakeholder demands, technical debts, and unexpected fires. The ability to instinctively know what deserves your attention—and what can wait—often separates great product managers from the rest.
While prioritization frameworks like MoSCoW and RICE provide structure, real-world decision-making often comes down to experience, intuition, and an understanding of trade-offs. So, how do you develop this instinct and make confident choices about where to invest time, effort, and resources?
The MoSCoW and RICE Approaches
To build strong prioritization instincts, it helps to internalize structured frameworks. Two of the most widely used models in product management are MoSCoW and RICE.
The MoSCoW Method
MoSCoW helps categorize work into four buckets:
• Must-Have – Essential for the product to function or succeed. If this isn’t done, the project fails.
• Should-Have – Important but not critical. These add significant value but can be postponed if needed.
• Could-Have – Nice-to-have enhancements that improve user experience but won’t make or break the product.
• Won’t-Have – Out of scope for now and can be safely deferred.
MoSCoW is great for high-level planning, ensuring the team aligns on non-negotiables while acknowledging what can wait. However, it doesn’t account for impact and effort, which is where RICE comes in.
The RICE Framework
RICE helps prioritize initiatives based on:
• Reach – How many users will be affected?
• Impact – How much will this improve user experience or business outcomes?
• Confidence – How sure are we about the impact?
• Effort – How much time and resources are needed?
By calculating a RICE score, you can compare competing priorities objectively. While frameworks help build structure, experienced product managers develop a gut sense of prioritization that moves beyond formulas.
The Instinctive Prioritization Mindset
While frameworks provide a foundation, instinctual prioritization emerges from experience. Here are some principles I've discovered that can help refine your decision-making:
1. Recognize the Difference Between Important and Urgent
Not all fires are equal. Some demand immediate action, while others seem urgent but have little long-term impact. As a product leader, your instinct will improve as you assess:
• Is this a critical blocker? If so, address it now.
• Will ignoring this cause greater issues later? If yes, schedule time for it.
• Is this just noise? If so, let it go.
2. Understand Business and Customer Impact
Prioritization becomes second nature when you deeply understand your customers and business goals. Every decision should ladder up to these:
• Does this improve core metrics (retention, conversion, revenue, etc.)?
• Does it solve a pain point users actively complain about?
• Does it align with the company’s strategic goals?
If the answer is yes to multiple questions, it’s likely worth prioritizing.
3. Balance Short-Term Wins with Long-Term Growth
It’s easy to focus on quick wins, but sustainable success requires balancing short-term and long-term investments.
• Quick wins: Small, high-impact changes that show immediate value.
• Long-term bets: Infrastructure, technical debt, or strategic features that may take longer but are crucial for scaling.
Developing the instinct to toggle between these ensures you’re not just reacting to fires but also shaping the future.
4. Use the 80/20 Rule
One of my favorites, often, 20% of the work delivers 80% of the impact. Recognizing which features, fixes, or initiatives fall into that high-leverage category helps you prioritize effectively. Learning this principle is crucial when you need to find quick wins.
Ask: What is the smallest, simplest thing we can do that will create the biggest impact?
5. Trust Your Team’s Expertise
No product leader should make decisions in isolation. Engineers understand technical complexity and the "how". Designers see usability gaps. Customer success teams know pain points firsthand.
• If an engineer says a bug is trivial to fix and affects thousands of users, prioritize it.
• If a designer insists a UX issue is causing friction, investigate further.
• If sales continues to hear the same missing feature complaint, take note.
Great prioritization comes from synthesizing diverse inputs, not just relying on gut instinct alone.
6. Don’t Let Perfection Block Progress
Not every feature, fix, or initiative needs to be flawless before shipping. Sometimes, getting something into users’ hands quickly is better than waiting for perfection.
Ask: Is this “good enough” to deliver value now? If yes, ship it and iterate later.
7. Revisit Priorities Regularly
Instinctive prioritization isn’t static. What was a Must-Have last quarter might be irrelevant today. What was low impact last month might now be a top priority.
Make it a habit to review roadmaps, backlog items, and priorities frequently. This helps ensure your focus remains aligned with reality.
The Takeaway
Developing a strong instinct for prioritization is a mix of structured thinking, deep product understanding, and experience-driven intuition. Frameworks like MoSCoW and RICE provide a foundation, but real-world prioritization requires balancing urgency, impact, effort, and long-term goals.
when you invest in sharpening your ability to distinguish between noise and necessity, leveraging team expertise, and continuously reassessing priorities, you’ll develop the kind of decision-making instincts that make great product leaders truly stand out.